(4 October 1937 – 19 September 2015)

Jacqueline Jill “Jackie” Collins OBE  was a British-American romance novelist. She moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, where she lived, became a U.S. citizen and spent most of her career. She wrote 32 novels, all of which appeared on The New York Times bestsellers list. In total, her books have sold over 500 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. Eight of her novels have been adapted for the screen, either as films or television mini-series. She was the younger sister of actress Joan Collins.

Collins held dual citizenship: British (by birth) and U.S. (by naturalization, from 6 May 1960).

Collins married her first husband, Wallace Austin, in 1960 and divorced in 1964. They had one child, Tracy, born in 1961. In 1965, Collins married for the second time to art gallery and nightclub (Ad-Lib, Tramp) owner, Oscar Lerman. The wedding took place in the home of her sister Joan and Anthony Newley, who were married at the time. Collins and Lerman had two daughters, Tiffany (born 1967) and Rory (born 1969). Lerman also formally adopted Collins’ daughter, Tracy, from her previous marriage. Lerman died in 1992 from prostate cancer.

In 1994, Collins became engaged to Los Angeles business executive Frank Calcagnini, who died in 1998 from a brain tumour. She said that what got her through the tragedies of losing two loved ones was “celebrating their lives, as opposed to dwelling on their deaths.”

In 2011 she was asked if she was dating anyone, Collins said “I have a man for every occasion”, adding:

“When I was a kid growing up, I used to read my father’s Playboy and I’d see these guys and they had fantastic apartments and cars. I have all of that now. Why would I want to hook myself up with one man when I’ve had two fantastic men in my life? One was my husband for over 20 years and one was my fiance for six years.”

In The Sunday Times Rich List 2011, Collins was listed as the UK’s fifth richest author with an estimated personal fortune of £60 million. And in 2013 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) Birthday Honours for services to fiction and charity.

Throughout Collins’ career, her personal life was used as a fictionalized source for her novels. She said she loved Los Angeles, and recalled that while growing up in England, she often read novels by Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler. Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne explains that Collins “loved the picture business, the television business, the record business, and the people in them, the stars, celebrities, directors, and producers.” And although she was a “great partygoer”, he says, she went to them “more as an observer than participant,” using them as part of her “research.” “Write about what you know,” Collins said at a writer’s conference. “I love what I do. I fall in love with my characters. They become me, and I become them.”

Collins died on 19 September 2015, of breast cancer, two weeks before her 78th birthday. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer more than six years before her death but kept her illness almost entirely to herself. She reportedly only informed her sister two weeks before she died and flew from Los Angeles to London to appear on the ITV chat show Loose Women only nine days before her death.